piano-trio

Hampton Hawes / At The Piano

More Contemporary Label Jazz

  • A huge, rich and natural Contemporary pressing boasting excellent Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • This is the last record Hawes made, and it’s one of the most deeply emotional and satisfying albums of his entire career – it may even be his best, and for a man of his talents, that’s really saying something
  • “Hampton Hawes’ final recording found him returning not only to the acoustic piano after having dabbled in electric keyboards from 1972-74, but to producer Lester Koenig and his Contemporary label, where Hawes recorded most of his classic gems of the 1950s… Teamed up with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne, Hawes shows that he was still in prime form.”
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Hampton Hawes last album is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but should.

This is my favorite Hampton Hawes record of all time. He died less than a year after these sessions. Looking at the cover, you can almost see in his face his acceptance of the end he knew was coming. He plays with deep emotion here.

Ray Brown and Shelly Manne, the same rhythm section who back Joe Sample on my all-time favorite piano trio album, The Three, accompany Hawes beautifully here. (more…)

Oscar Peterson – Night Train

More of the Music of Oscar Peterson

  • Night Train debuts on the site with solid Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides of this Stereo Verve reissue pressing
  • It’s yet another example of a record that sounds better on the right reissue rather than the original, and of course, the only folks who can possibly know such a thing are those who do shootouts
  • Rich, solid bass; you-are-there immediacy; energy and drive; instruments that are positively jumping out of the speakers – add it all up and you can see that this copy had the sound we were looking for
  • Val Valentin engineered, one of the greats in our world – he’s responsible for an awful lot of our favorite audiophile-quality recordings
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…a definitive look at the 1960s Oscar Peterson trio.” 

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Oscar Peterson’s Best Recording? Sure Sounds Like It to Us

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Oscar Peterson Available Now

I’ve known this was a well recorded album since I first heard the DCC Gold CD back in the 90s.

It sounded great to me at the time, although I had nothing to compare it to. I was not an Oscar Peterson fan in those days. The CD may be very good, but it is unlikely to hold a candle to any of our Hot Stamper vinyl pressings.

I now realize that this album is clearly one of the best jazz piano recordings ever made. In its own way it’s every bit as good as  another landmark recording we talk about, The Three, recorded in 1975.

This album checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

The description for the amazing copy we found in our shootout more than a decade ago has been reproduced below.

The Right Sound from the Get Go

Side one starts out with a solid, full-bodied piano and snare drum, a sure sign of great sound to come. This side was richer and fuller than all the other copies we played. That rich tonality is key to getting the music to work. It keeps all the instrumental elements in balance. The natural top on this side is just more evidence that the mastering and pressing are top drawer. Great space and immediacy, powerful driving energy — this side could not be beat.

And side two was every bit as good! The sound was jumpin’ out of the speakers. There was not a trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except for us of course).

Ray Brown’s bass is huge, probably bigger than it would be in real life, but I can live with that. Once again, with this kind of extended top end, the space of the studio and harmonics of the instruments are reproduced brilliantly.

Testing with Oscar

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term)
  • We like them to be solidly weighted
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that for some reason is rarely mentioned in the audiophile reviews we read [more on smear at the end of this commentary]

Here are some of our favorite jazz records with top quality piano sound

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

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Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus Is a Bloated Mess at 45 RPM from Hoffman, Gray and Kassem

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Piano Recordings Available Now

We played an amazing Hot stamper copy that got the bottom end on this album as right as we’ve ever heard. The contribution of the bass player was clear and correctly balanced in the mix, which we soon learned to appreciate was fundamentally important to the rhythmic drive of the music.

The bass was so tight and note-like you could see right into the soundstage and practically picture Monte Budwig plucking and bowing away.

This is precisely where the 45 RPM pressing goes off the rails.

The bloated, much-too-heavy and poorly-defined bass of the Heavy Vinyl remaster makes a mess of the Brazilian and African rhythms inherent in the music. If you own that $50 waste of money, believe me, you will not be tapping your foot to Cast Your Fate to the Wind or Manha de Carnival.

Our rule of thumb: he better the system, the more second-rate Hoffman’s remastered records will sound when they aren’t just terrible.

Is this the worst version of the album ever made? That’s hard to say.

But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Take our advice and don’t do it.

If you like the sound of old McIntosh tube equipment like the Mac 30s shown here, a sound Steve Hoffman apparently cannot get enough of, these remastered records have your name all over them.

We don’t sell junk like this, but every other audiophile record dealer does, because most of the current group of mastering engineers making records for audiophiles have somehow gotten into their heads that this is the way records should sound.

We’ve been telling them they are wrong about that for years now, that good records have never sounded this way, but the collectors and audiophiles of the world keep buying their wares, so why should they listen to us?

If you want to know what a properly-mastered, properly-pressed copy sounds like, we put the last one up in 2023.

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Phineas Newborn, Jr. – A World of Piano!

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

 

  • Superb Double Plus (A++) sound brings Newborn’s first album for Contemporary to life on this vintage copy pressed on exceptionally quiet OJC vinyl
  • One of the most musically impressive jazz piano recordings we’ve played in years – Newborn’s improvisational skills are operating at a very high level
  • The team of Roy DuNann and Howard Holzer insure that everything you want in an audiophile quality piano trio recording is here
  • If you don’t have any Phineas Newborn albums in your collection, this is definitely the place to start
  • 5 stars: “Phineas Newborn’s Contemporary debut (he would record six albums over a 15-year period for the label) was made just before physical problems began to interrupt his career…. He performs five jazz standards and three obscurities by jazz composers on this superb recital…”

Old and New Work Well Together

This reissue is spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the added benefit of mastering using the more modern cutting equipment of the 70s and 80s. We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of 40+ years ago, not the generally opaque, veiled and lifeless mastering so common today.

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title, as you will surely hear for yourself on these superb sides.

We were impressed with the fact that these pressings excel in so many areas of reproduction. What was odd about it — odd to most audiophiles but not necessarily to us — was just how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the right pressing.

This leads me to think that most of the natural, full-bodied, lively, clear, rich sound of the recording was still on the tape decades later, and that all that was needed to get that vintage sound on to a record was simply to thread up the tape on the right machine and hit play. The fact that practically nobody seems to be able to make a record nowadays that sounds remotely this good tells me that I’m wrong to think that such an approach tends to work, if our experience with hundreds of mediocre Heavy Vinyl reissues is relevant.

The Piano

There was virtually no trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except us of course).

If you have full-range speakers, some of the qualities you may recognize in the sound of the piano are weight and warmth. The piano is not hard, brittle or tinkly. Instead, the better copies show you a wonderfully full-bodied, rich, smooth piano, one which sounds remarkably like the ones we’ve all heard countless times in piano bars and restaurants.

In other words, like a real piano, not a recorded one. This is what we look for in a good piano recording. Bad mastering can ruin the sound, and often does, along with worn out stampers and bad vinyl and five gram needles that scrape off the high frequencies. But a few — a very few — copies survive all such hazards. They manage to reproduce the full spectrum of the piano’s wide range (and of course the wonderful performance of the pianist) on vintage vinyl, showing us the kind of sound we simply cannot find any other way.

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Shelly Manne and His Friends – My Fair Lady on the Yellow Label

More of the Music of Shelly Manne

  • My Fair Lady returns to the site for only the second time in two years, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • The piano sounds lifelike right from the start – a beautiful instrument in a natural space, tonally correct from top to bottom
  • Here is the proof that this is a Demo Disc quality recording for Contemporary, which is saying a lot, considering how many great recordings this label can claim
  • Recorded entirely in one session, this album was the first jazz recording using only songs from a Broadway musical
  • 5 stars: “This trio set by Shelly Manne & His Friends… was a surprise best-seller and is now considered a classic…The result is a very appealing set that is easily recommended.”

This vintage Contemporary stereo LP has Demo Disc quality sound.

How can you beat a Roy DuNann piano trio recording? The timbre of the instruments is so spot-on it makes all the hard work and money you’ve put into your stereo more than pay off.

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Shelly Manne & His Friends – Bells Are Ringing

More of the Music of Shelly Manne

  • An early Contemporary pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be amazed at how big and rich and tubey the sound is
  • This copy makes it clear that this is a Demo Disc quality recording for Contemporary, and that’s saying a lot
  • It’s also our favorite jazz piano performance by Andre Previn on record
  • Only a handful of copies of this title have made it on the site in the last few years – finding them in audiophile condition is getting harder (and more expensive) than ever these days
  • “Previn’s piano is the lead voice and his virtuosity, good taste, melodic improvising, and solid sense of swing are chiefly responsible for the music’s success.”

I have a very long history with this album, going back decades. My friend Robert Pincus first turned me on to the CD, which, happily for all concerned, was mastered beautifully. We used it to test and tweak all the stereos in my friends’ systems.

Playing the original stereo record, which I assumed must never have been reissued due to its rarity (I have since learned otherwise), all I could hear on my ’90s all tube system was blurred mids, lack of transient attack, sloppy bass, lack of space and transparency, and other shortcomings too numerous to mention that I simply attributed at the time to vintage jazz vinyl.

Well, things have certainly changed. I have virtually none of the equipment I had back then, and I hear none of the problems with this copy that I heard back then on pressing I owned. This is clearly a different LP (I sold off the old one years ago) but I have to think that much of the change in the sound was a change in cleaning, equipment, tweaks and room treatments, all the stuff we prattle on about endlessly on the site.

In other words, if you have a highly-resolving modern system and a good room, you should be knocked out by the sound of this record. I sure was.

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Hampton Hawes at the Piano Is His Best Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Hampton Hawes Available Now

This Contemporary Yellow Label LP has the best sound and the best music we have ever heard on a Hampton Hawes album.

When we frist dropped the needle on this one many years ago we could not believe our ears — it’s got The Big Sound, that’s for sure.

If you’re a fan of jazz piano trios playing live-in-the-studio, this Contemporary from 1958 surely deserves a place in your collection. Of course it’s a personal favorite of yours truly.

This is my favorite Hampton Hawes record of all time. He died less than a year after these sessions. Looking at the cover, you can almost see in his face his acceptance of the end he knew was coming. He plays with deep emotion here.

Ray Brown and Shelly Manne (the same rhythm section who back Joe Sample on my all-time favorite piano trio album, The Three) accompany Hawes beautifully here.

As good as The Three may be, it is not remotely as natural sounding as this Contemporary recording by Roy DuNann. Due to the multi-miking approach Lee Herschberg took for the session, Shelly Manne’s drums on The Three stretch from speaker to speaker, presenting us with a drummer whose arms are impossibly long.

On this Contemporary recording the drummer is placed in the soundfield in one fixed location and his drum kit is the size of a standard jazz kit of the ’50s. I’m good with either approach, but there’s no question which one is more natural.

Drop the needle on “Blue In Green” on side two — the sound of the bowed bass is WONDERFUL. The version of “Killing Me Softly With His Song” that opens the album is especially lovely. (One high point of this album is the interview that Lester Koenig conducts with Hampton Hawes on the back cover. Lester died soon thereafter himself.)

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Bill Evans – Waltz for Debby

More of the Music of Bill Evans

  • Waltz for Debby makes its Hot Stamper debut on this reissue pressing that boasts two incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides, just shy of our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over practically all other copies we played
  • This is not an original (those are terrible sounding), not a later reissue (also bad), and not the original OJC (which is passable at best) – no, this is modern pressing that — finally! — has the sound we have been trying to find for the last twenty or so years
  • Normally this is information we might not choose to share, as anyone can buy a modern OJC, but the fact that so many different OJC versions exist — I counted six different OJC-210s — means you probably would spend a lot more money finding a good sounding OJC pressing than the price we are charging
  • However, if you do find a great sounding OJC, be sure to drop us a line and let us know that stamper numbers — we would be curious to know if anyone was actually able to succeed with such an effort
  • If you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful session from 1961, recorded live at the Village Vanguard in New York, this pressing will let you do that
  • 5 stars: “Evans chose the material here, and, possibly, in some unconscious way, revealed on these sessions … a different side of his musical personality that had never been displayed on his earlier solo recordings or during his tenures with Miles Davis and George Russell: Evans was an intensely romantic player, flagrantly emotional, and that is revealed here in spades on tunes such as ‘My Foolish Heart’ and ‘Detour Ahead.'”

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Louie Bellson / Ray Brown / Paul Smith – Intensive Care

More Direct-to-Disc Recordings

More Jazz Piano Recordings

  • Both sides of this amazing Discwasher direct-to-disc Japanese import earned STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sonic grades
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible copy in our notes: “so big and roomy”…”no veil at all” (side one)…”huge and rich with a power low-end”…”very articulate and round piano”…”tubey and weighty”…”best bass, deep and note-like” (side two)
  • One of our all time favorite direct-to-discs; Piano Trio doesn’t get much better than this
  • Paul Smith is an underrated jazz player – most of his albums as a leader are forgettable (we should know, we’ve played a bunch of them), but on this album he swings and really makes music with his two bandmates
  • The playing is extremely energetic and involving, the sound is some of the best we’ve heard, and the engineering is by Phil Schier, who also recorded another favorite direct disc of ours, Friendship, and we recommend both albums highly
  • If you want a good jazz direct-to-disc, you would be hard pressed to find one better than this
  • If you’re a fan of piano trio jazz recordings, recorded direct to disc or otherwise, this is a killer record from 1978 that belongs in your collection.

This record probably doesn’t have the reputation it deserves because it came out on the Discwasher label, which to my knowledge, only made one good record, this one. The same metalwork would have been used to make the version Pausa released, and that fairly common pressing may be virtually identical to this Discwasher pressing. (more…)